The present invention relates in general to the control of vehicle accessory systems and more specifically to an accessory control responsive to voice inputs from a voice recognition unit and manual inputs from a manually activated switch.
Voice recognition has been and continues to be developed to provide input to electronically controlled systems in response to spoken commands. Voice responsive systems are useful in automotive vehicles to control vehicle accessories with minimal effort, minimal errors, and maximum convenience. As used herein, vehicle accessory means any system controlled by an occupant of a vehicle such as a cellular phone, an audio entertainment system, a climate control system, a vehicle lighting system, a windshield wiper system, a window defrost system, or a vehicle speed control system, for example.
A voice recognition unit receives a speech input by way of a microphone in the form of an utterance which is compared to preprogrammed and stored utterances to determine a match that identifies an appropriate command. The reliability of matching an utterance with the intended command is related to ambient background noise contained in an utterance picked up by the microphone and to the size of a corresponding command set with which an utterance is to be compared. In a typical voice recognition unit, the degree of similarity between a received utterance and the preprogrammed utterances is designed to provide optimum voice recognition performance without errors. However, it is known to require an even closer match in certain comparisons to avoid a problem known as "falsing", which is unintended actuation of a command such as the powering on of a system leading to annoying or incorrect operation.
On the other hand, when such a closer match is required it may become difficult to activate a desired command in a noisy environment. Furthermore, voice characteristics or habits of a particular user may be somewhat inconsistent, thereby making voice control difficult.
Accordingly, it is principal object of the invention to provide a vehicle accessory system responsive to voice commands while avoiding a falsing problem and simultaneously alleviating any difficulty in activating certain commands.